CONVERSATION: Laura Albert by Taylor Lewandowski, "A Misstep in Childhood"

Taylor talks with Laura about gender, sexuality, child abuse, all the elements that created JT LeRoy, and all the things that make JT LeRoy real.

If you don’t know the story of JT LeRoy, there are many documentaries, a Hollywood adaptation, a soon-to-be-published memoir, numerous interviews, and many critical breakdowns. I have far less interest in the creation of the avatar/persona of JT or the celebrities involved or any other cursory information — all of which has been analyzed and teased out to such a degree that some might wonder: What’s left to consider? But in all the coverage, there is a noticeable lack of confronting the complicated nature of gender in the literature and life of Laura Albert, and the mixture of celebrity culture mixed with child abuse that created a mirror-like force. A bond was encrypted into the language, acting as a catalyst for others to recognize their own trauma or to reveal their own desires, addictions, confusions, aspirations.

Feuerzeig’s documentary Author: The JT LeRoy Story makes clear that Albert’s “world-building” derives from a deep place of trauma. But I also think of Avital Ronell’s description of writing as a dictation from “remoter regions of being.” Writer Alissa Bennett echoes this interpretation: “It seems perfectly logical to me that Laura was a kind of vessel for this culmination of stories and injuries that already existed in some other frequency. It’s something I deeply believe.” What if the act of writing, or “channeling” as Bennett describes it, or Ronell’s theory of “Dictation,” creates an opportunity to heal and, as Albert says, “rewire the brain”?

I met Laura Albert at Storyfort in Boise, Idaho in March of 2025. I had read Sarah, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, and Harold’s End before meeting her — and watched the documentaries years ago. We instantly bonded. This interview was conducted over the phone.

Taylor Lewandowski: When I met you at Storyfort, you mentioned you always wanted to be a gay boy. There’s certainly always a tension between male and female in your work. From Sarah to The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, the protagonists vacillate between boy and girl, corresponding to how it benefits the desire of their pursuant, and their own discomfort. Conscious or not, they float among the dangerous power dynamics between men with their all-consuming obsessions and a twisted hope for love, acceptance. They become whatever the “lover” perceives them to be. They act as a shapeshifter, which obviously leaves the protagonists with a destabilized sense of identity and autonomy.

Laura Albert: My mother was a musical playwright. We lived in this project for middle class, with civil servants, Holocaust survivors, nurses, a lot of educators. It was diverse in every way. I was around a lot of gay guys—some involved in theater. I noticed my mother would write for magazines under a male name, Rollin Albert. She understood the difference. She observed how men treated women. She wanted to go to law school, but there was a quota on how many Jewish women could attend — same for the theater, all the playwrights were men. But she never stopped trying. She always devised new ways to be heard, adapt, change, learn from her environment.

Celebrities were everywhere and she inherently understood celebrity worship, explaining to me the hysteria over Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra. How much of it was staged, pre-planned and that behavior was contagious. Girls would faint. Once the idea was presented, it was allowed, and they had a visceral, bodily response to this persona on the stage. She explained it to me, even in terms of writing. She taught me how to ride the roller coasters at Coney Island again and again, teaching me to relax my stomach muscles. I finally learned how to do it. So, if you saw a celebrity, you ignored them or you worshipped them, but, and this is what I learned from my mother: What if you approached them as another artist? Not as an excited fan.

TL: What about your relation to gender?

LA: As a kid, I recognized boys had power. They were allowed to be free. They were allowed to act mischievous. I also witnessed pedophilia from a young age, either men with boys or men with girls. As I got older, I saw a difference between the power and freedom. From a societal lens, it seemed that it was worse if a boy was sexually abused, because a girl must have done or said something to deserve it. How could a boy do wrong? It took years for people to outright say this is problematic. No one wanted to talk about this. When they dared, it was a joke, people laughed — it’s ridiculous. It’s so humiliating. Like when I was in grade school and some boys would pull out your chair and you’d sit down and fall to the floor, everyone just laughing at you. I absorbed the message, the power dynamics, the license to act mischievous.

It was a combination of my sexual abuse, believing if I was a boy this wouldn’t have happened, to stories from Peter Pan to nursery rhymes. Early dissociation. I’d create these stories in my head and watch them to fall asleep at night. A boy would come to me with their terrible life and explain the different abuses to varying extremes. Sometimes they were rescued. Sometimes they’d die and I’d be drenched in tears, unable to stop crying — trying my best to change the ending, but I couldn’t. It was like a TV series — my own soap opera.

TL: Do you think the voice of JT LeRoy or these other boys would have continued if it wasn’t revealed that you wrote the books?

LA: No, because when I was on the set of Deadwood, it changed and shifted. JT and I were like conjoined twins, but by that time I was the stronger one — no longer the appendage. David Milch gave me a massive gift. He understood JT was this separate part, but I needed to get there on my own time. The boys no longer had power over me. There’s that saying: God does for you what you cannot do for yourself. It had to be done. I would never have done it. I believed I was unlovable. I had nothing to say. I loved JT more than anyone else, but he became a real ghost. I didn’t want to admit it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to revive him. I don’t have it anymore. I can’t pull down the screen and access this alternative world. It was painful and devastating, realizing my access was gone. I had felt so absorbed in the drama. It had helped me fall asleep.

I always tell this story of David Milch at the beginning of the season, asking me, “How do you want your name to appear in the credits?” And I said, “JT LeRoy.” He gave me this disappointed look. After I was outed, around 2005 or ‘06, he came to me again with the same question. I mumbled, “Laura Albert.” I didn’t even know how to say my name. He said, “That’s what I had hoped.”

Laura Albert on the set of Deadwood: The Film in 2018

TL: It was this moment of reckoning, clarity, healing.

LA: He allowed me to get there. He understood what was going on psychologically. He said I was in conversation with William Faulkner. I kept looking at other people for a reflection. I was not a whole entire being. I did not have a real sense of self. I remember when I’d do an interview, I’d hope they’d be able to explain myself to me. I needed someone else to help me understand how I was perceived.

TL: Wow. [Laughs] I’m laughing, because I understand that feeling.

LA: When I talk to Leigh Ledare, he explains so much to me, I’m surprised. I’m like a surfer adjusting to the waves — unaware of anything else. I just feel it in my body. I don’t completely understand what’s going on. I didn’t have the language back then, but I knew JT LeRoy was real. There wasn’t this devilish manipulation going on. So, now I return, again and again, to this question: Will anyone ever understand this beyond a “hoax”? CNN just came out with top ten hoaxes. James Frey was number one and I was number two. They didn’t even say anything bad about me. The picture they used made me look hot, and often that is all that matters.

But I’m shocked at the level that I gave my power over to people. Someone else knew better than I. Information was not available to me. When you grow up without a steadiness, you can’t echolocate yourself, it becomes a habit — innate. It’s a learned behavior. Returning to the voices of these boys, I remember this very famous painting by Pavel Tchelitchew, Hide-and-Seek. If you look at it straight on, it’s a tree, but if you back away it’s a baby’s brain. The entire tree made of children. It was horrifying — this painting. It scared the shit out of me.

TL: Disturbing.

LA: When my parents divorced, shit hit the fan. My mother became the kid and I the parent. She started growing weed, dating horrible men and bringing them home, which was so dangerous. I lost control and dropped out of school; she went back to school to teach. When I was fourteen, I proposed to her the idea of doing phone sex. Coming out of the ‘70s sexual liberation and her own rebellion against a repressive childhood, she was OK with this. The mafia put in a separate phone line and she’d go pick up the check. But my capacity to do this would not have been possible if there hadn’t already been an inappropriate breach of my sexual being. The idea of a parent accepting this and letting it go on… I would never. I mean, what the fuck happened?

I learned how to do phone sex by watching other girls, like my extremely sexually active friend in fifth and sixth grade. I was just a wallflower, but we did have a threesome with this other girl in middle school. I’d just watch her. Every guy was in love with her. Of course she had been sexually abused. It was so fucking common. The wildness of the seventies and eighties in New York. I didn’t have a physical body that would catch a guy’s eye, but I could capture them over the phone. I could incorporate the behavior of girls and guys. It helped me envision this body I wished I had.

TL: There’s this disconnect from body and mind inherent in the phone sex, which mirrors your relation to JT LeRoy.

LA: I mean, I was so innocent. When someone asked for water sports, I thought they meant going swimming. I didn’t know they wanted to be peed on or hear me urinate. I had a lot to learn. And when I started phone sex again in my twenties, it all went into Sarah. Like with men who called and wanted to dress up in women’s garments, but kept it hidden. JT got his name from a phone-sex client in the Midwest: Bruce LeRoy. (He’s okay with me talking about him.) He does not hide his desires now. We became friends off the line, off the meter, and I asked him: Why do you have to hide? He had much shame and was such a great guy. Our conversations were his only outlet.

There were so many other boys. It was like spinning a bottle, JT was from West Virginia. One boy was from Sweden. I never knew where the spinning bottle, so to speak, would land.

TL: I’m fascinated by this multitude of voices originating from childhood.

LA: Oh, yeah. I was known for that. The voices always had a progression. They wanted their own body. They wanted to be rescued. I remember one of the boys wanted to be rescued by Father Bruce Ritter. In New York it was illegal to run away till 1978 — they’d arrest you. You could go to juvie. There was this place called Covenant House started by Father Bruce Ritter. It was one of the only places for runaways. I knew from other kids that they would sort the kids there. If you were cute, pretty, you’d go upstairs to him. He had a special place for his boys. I called as a boy and I was sorted over the phone. I started talking to Bruce and he invited me to a special place, he made it clear, my boy would not be with the other tougher street kids. He was very desirous of my boy. There was this access if you were a certain kind of boy. I was talking to Father Ritter, the supposed patron saint of saving kids, but I knew what it was about.

You know what I wished, Taylor? I didn’t want to expose him. I wanted to be his special boy. I wanted to accommodate him. It was fucked up. A friend of mine, who knew I made these calls, devised a plan for us to go as runaway boys and visit Father Ritter, but I knew it’d never work. I couldn’t “pass” as a boy. He was a cute boy, I was not. When you’re overweight, there’s this neutered quality, neither boy nor girl. But when I was eleven, I had this short Beatles haircut, my family visited England, and everyone called me lad. I loved it. I was so happy. I was a lad.

TL: This makes sense to me, but even this frustration and recognition is evident in Sarah. This may be a wrong interpretation, or perhaps outdated in a way, but the persona, JT LeRoy, the voices of the boy, locating a comfort in androgyny or the male body acts as this loose fluctuating register of transitioning, as if instead of transitioning to male, there’s another person birthed out of the past. But also there’s this severe complicated relationship between the child and the adult. Other people project their desires onto them — an idolization of something blank. It’s dangerous. Or perhaps a more common relation: a parental figure projecting their own rigid image of who this child should be.

LA: Yes — the dynamic is sexualized. I return to this idea of the boy as mischievous. Huck Finn. Peter Pan. They could be bad. They could go on adventures. I remember my dad talking to a boy who looked like the character Tanner from The Bad News Bears. The boy mentioned not going to school, which I’d always got in trouble for, but my dad just laughed and they talked baseball. There was a clear difference. Again, I was a very specific girl: the chubby girl. At the time, I’d look in the media for someone like me and there was nothing. The big chubby girl was always the joke or someone to be scared of. When I was in a band, we were doing well but I had to stop. Again, no one looked like me, not in the mainstream. I was either starving or binge eating. I couldn’t front a band in my body. There was also this difference between gay and lesbian. When I was a kid, gay men were cool, but lesbians were seen as spooky. Nobody really understood or discussed it. Meanwhile, I was bringing home girls and sleeping with them, but there was no language for any of it. It wasn’t till my first real girlfriend, head of ACT UP, Gerri Wells, and I’d attend meetings with her—I also was seeing her when her brother passed from AIDS—that I started to come out, but I still didn’t understand a thing.

TL: The language was inaccessible.

LA: That’s why I think I have a hunger to understand others or how a person experiences various dynamics and turns out a certain way.

TL: I was thinking about that too — the psychological makeup created in youth or adolescence, which influences you much later in life. How does the past affect who we are in the present?

LA: The more you explore other people’s lives, it’s like trying on different identities — that’s where I feel literature’s power resides. It’s like this children’s book when this bird falls out of the nest and asks objects, like a steam shovel, “Are you my mother?” Or maybe like Horton Hears a Who! Horton hears what no one else can hear. The community demonizes him for it. There’s another world here and they want to take it away. They can’t stand his delusions. They must destroy it. The only hope is if they can hear what he hears, then it’ll be okay. That’s how I feel exactly. How do I allow people to see and hear what I know is real? How do I get them to pay attention to what I perceived as atrocities?

TL: This has always been your mission, even if you didn’t quite understand it. It informs all your work.

LA: I’m just now putting this together as I talk to you. I do believe in a high compassion or a way to grab people’s attention. This is the power of storytelling. Representation is so important. We must see it in art, reflected back to us. There’s also this inability to confront difficult truths. Humans are wired for both. Different locks that can decipher or unseal these insurmountable fortresses. Art affects how we evolve and change. To really immerse in a life and character takes us on a journey that can rewire our brains.

TL: As the reader, you are inside the writer’s head. It’s a specific type of intimacy. A shared consciousness.

LA: You’re merging with them—no one will see it the same way. I wanted to write these things, because how do I get you, the reader, to see what I see, because I felt so tortured by what I saw, what I was immersed within.

TL: I had this recent conversation with Ariana Reines around her new book of poetry, The Rose, which is partly about past medieval depictions of a demon sleeping with a woman. She’s cultivated this idea of birthing magic. To create art for some is like birthing magic. An artist sleeps with the devil. We have a choice. We will face evil, whatever that might mean, and we either succumb or gradually repel it. The meaning of art, thinking about the tradition of alchemy and magic, takes these horrors and turns them into opportunities of healing, compassion, rewiring, etc. In terms of JT LeRoy, and your work, there’s an obvious heightened pitch that resonated with so many people and continues to. You attract readers who were sexually assaulted at a young age. That’s the strongest connective tissue, but not the sole connection.

LA: Yes — or a misstep in their childhood. One night at Storyfort, I was in the hotel lobby with Christian Winn and this guy approached us. This guy’s father was the first in the San Diego area to come forward and talk about his sexual abuse in the Catholic church. After that moment, people were suing the church, but this guy’s father broke the ceiling, although he never sued, received no damages. But he opened the door so others could.

We also talked about a book called The Courage to Heal. It was one of the first to focus on sexual abuse, specifically with women. It listed all these side effects or disorders related to sexual abuse. And the book clearly implied that, if you had any of these symptoms, you must have been violently raped, and blocked it out, and/or you are a victim of abuse by a Satanic cult. I was attending Overeaters Anonymous, and some of the women were accusing their parents of raping them — they all had recovered memory syndrome. They were suddenly victims of a Satanic cult. I had this roommate who was convinced I was a victim of Satanic cults and had repressed it. This was the eighties. I had to fight with therapists, because of my symptoms. Even when I tried to tell them about the boys, they diagnosed me with multiple personality. What was lost were all these micro-aggressions in terms of sexual abuse. A child is a delicate spinning top, it doesn’t take much interference to knock one off a developmental “normal” course. Abuse doesn’t have to be sexually explicit; it could be an older relative placing a hand under your ass when you sit down, or an adult reading you stories that you know are inappropriate.

I still don’t think we truly know how to talk about the invasion of a child’s sexuality. We don’t know how to handle it. We don’t understand the effects. My outrage was at the hierarchy or level of pain expected in a representation of child abuse. People would always say to JT, “What I went through wasn’t as bad as what you went through.” But it was as bad — for them. Just as what I went through was as bad for me. Because I wanted to allow people to listen, I had to make his suffering extreme in my books. And make it clear that he wasn’t this innocent angel, which I kept seeing in representations, such as A Rock and a Hard Place.

TL: Well, that’s interesting because that “memoir” was complete fiction.

LA: It was complete bullshit. I read anything that had to do with abuse for a period of time. I read D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and I was so disappointed. l was looking for a real depiction. I was always upset when readers would compare JT LeRoy to A Rock and a Hard Place. I don’t care who wrote it. It doesn’t matter. It wasn’t a true representation of an abused kid.

TL: It didn’t feel true?

LA: The writer describes him as this untouched, Christ-like figure. From my experience of kids on the street and at the time, many were from the punk/hardcore scene, we were not angels. You were sneaky, manipulative. You knew how to hustle and you were still loveable and you still had the right for that not to happen to you. You could be seductive, you learned to survive. It’s ridiculous, the kid in the book is sexually abused but remains pure, his body does not respond. Bullshit.

TL: So much has been projected onto JT LeRoy.

LA: Or me.

TL: Yes. I noticed you’re friends with Pamela Sneed.

LA: We went to college together. We had the same teacher, Jane Lazarre, who told me I couldn’t write from a boy’s perspective. I didn’t know how to write as a girl. It was too close. Pamela told me to keep writing how the fuck I need to write. I could not write about sexual abuse unless it was from a boy’s perspective, but Jane said no.

My eating got out of control. I felt too fat and ugly to show up, I would stop showing up to class. Pamela’s writing was incredible, fearless. We became friends; it meant so much to me. I wasn’t cool looking. I didn’t dress like the other kids. I was wearing whatever fit, I was in a group home and couldn’t afford anything I wanted to wear. I couldn’t believe she wanted to be friends with me. We stayed in touch. And when everything blew up, and I was sued by a producer attempting to make a movie of my life, she was there for me at the trial. I’d look at her in the court, showing her support with a smile. It was the same as being on trial as a witch, concentrating on the people who knew and loved me made it possible to survive.

Pamela Sneed and Laura Albert outside the New York County Supreme Court building, 2007

Also, time has made a huge difference, it’s quite moving when someone reconsiders how they’d attached a negative concept of me. We often are invested in defending our beliefs, because what if we were wrong? Our culture makes it hard to reflect and change course, and if we’ve invested so much in raging at someone who did not do what we accused them of, what does that say about us? We all want to feel righteous. It’s very hard for folks to do that regardless of ideology.

For example, the musician Lawrence Rothman at first wrote to me how angry they felt when I was revealed as the writer JT LeRoy, but afterwards they realized how much they loved the books, how it’s still important, and they finally understood why I did what I did. We ended up becoming friends, and Lawrence recorded one of the stories on the audiobook of The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, with Pamela Sneed and others. For Lawrence, and some others, the reveal didn’t take anything away from them; instead it opened or revealed an opportunity to find another way of being that they already lived within, but at the time there was no language for. Their understanding included me — that I was a part of that queer community.

Now, if you were jerking off to this boy in my books or photos of the androgynous JT LeRoy in magazines, or wanted to be this boy and save this boy by being this boy — usually it was a mix of these emotions — and then you found out he’s “not real”… Often, a person is left not understanding their emotions and is overwhelmed by shame and whatever else they could not process, and that got transferred onto me. I made them feel something they were not ready to handle, and it was not comfortable.

TL: After I finished reading your books, I asked myself: Why aren’t there more? I wanted to read more, but I recently framed the question in a different perspective. I compared them to the work of Scott Heim, whose novels deal with child abuse, and act as these three books of healing, catharsis, and then there’s nothing else. Your relation to literature is much different than a traditional novelist. You generated these books, these voices, these personas as a way to heal. I know it’s not as simple, but I’m interested in your life post-JT LeRoy, which I think isn’t often talked about. It’s been twenty-five years since the publication of Sarah. What does it mean to be a writer after this division or separation from a very clear sense of narrative derived from trauma?

LA: People always ask if there will be another JT LeRoy book. There’s an unfinished novella that was advertised. Fans contact me hoping to get a copy of the manuscript. I met with Milch about it. His notes made me realize it needed more work. It’s still very painful, but I need to write about JT LeRoy and everyone involved. That’s why I wrote my memoir. How did we get here? If I write it cushioned by celebrity, like meeting Madonna or whatever, then I’m really engaging in the lie that I was famous once. I made it. I want to explain the details, the source, the unique situation.